...dedicated to...hmmm, we're still figuring that one out...
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| Late Friday evening, the Hawaii Board of Education rejected teaching creationism in Hawaii's schools. KITV (Yahoo posting) quoted cartoonist and webmaster of Bare Feats, Rob ART Morgan, as saying: "In reality, I feel they're both viable theories of origin. Both make unverifiable assumptions. Both draw conclusions by looking at the same evidence. They just happen to draw different conclusions." Rev. Mike Young is quoted as saying, "I speak as a pastor. I don't want your teachers teaching my kids about religion. They may be very good at the other things that they do. (Creationism), that's my business. Not theirs." The Honolulu Star-Bulletin has full coverage and photos of the story. By the way, if you'd wondering how the new Power Mac G4's benchmark against the older version, Rob has some answers. He also maintains a religious cartoon site, Barefoot on the Rock.
Another posting I first found on Kids Domain I'll deliver with a word of caution. Comp.Ed continues to add to their Match & Learn series. I'm listing this one as it is: 1), free; and 2), cross-platform. Be forewarned, however, that I found these applications along with many other of the freebies offered to be just barely a notch above shovelware. Gene Emery favorably reviews new JumpStart and Reader Rabbit educational software in his Reuters column, Games Teach Kids Language, Exploration. Since Knowledge Adventure inexplicably forgot to send my free evaluation copies of their new titles, I'll be in line with the rest of you shelling out $20 per CD for the cross-platform new offerings. I think I'm going to order JumpStart Languages and JumpStart Explorers for the younger set in my classroom. I'll have to stay away from the new Reader Rabbit offerings, however, as I developed an irresistible urge to smash any machine running Reader Rabbit back in the days before we had headsets to shut off the "enchanting" little Reader Rabbit jingle! (Note: I wasted a lot of time trying to find links to the programs Gene described on the Knowledge Adventure and JumpStart sites without any success.) Robert X. Cringely presents a pretty good conspiracy theory for mystery seekers in The Death of TCP/IP: Why the Age of Internet Innocence is Over. Cringely suggests Microsoft may have a plan to replace TCP/IP with its own proprietary MS/TCP.
Other good columns in Sunday's Chronicle include:
Diana Jean Schemo gives an interesting look at Secretary of Education Rod Paige in Education chief brings voice of classroom to Capitol Hill. Ms. Schemo notes that Dr. Paige may have been underutilized by the Bush Administration at times, according to a U.S. News report (See "Turn the Paige"). She quotes Paige as now saying, "I've found that niche that needs to be fulfilled, and grown from it, and found that's the contribution that I'm going to make. To see that everybody knows that when schools are reformed, they'll be reformed by people in the school buildings, not in Washington." (My appreciation of Dr. Paige just went up several notches!) If the Times is still swamped, the San Francisco Chronicle also picked up the syndicated version of the column. Governors Find Education Bill Faults, by Ken Maguire writing for Associated Press, tells of both Republican and Democratic governors' concerns with the education reform bill that now no one seems to like. Bilingual education is back in the headlines with CNN Education's Millionaire battles bilingual education and The Boston Globe's Bilingual ed loses favor with some educators. John Schilling of StimpSoft has released a major update to Son of Weather Grok. Version 4.0 (1.2 MB) now uses HTTP rather than FTP to gather data. What that may mean (or not) is that if you are stuck behind a school proxy server as I am that blocks FTP (so your students can't download "no-no's"), you may now be able to use the application. If you have used a previous version of Son of Weather Grok, the new version seems to pick up the previous preferences so that you won't have to reload all of the various cities you had previously selected. The new version is definitely much faster! And...Son of Weather Grok is still free. Another new Apple Store opened in Plano, Texas last Friday. What I want to know is when Apple is going to open a store in the Sullivan, Indiana, shopping mall. Oh yeah, we don't have a mall. Never mind.
Until last week, Educators' News had been one of the "best kept secrets" on the web. I had purposely not listed the site with any of the major search engines, as I really didn't know how long it would last and what it might turn out to be. I still lack the answers to those two questions, but recently listed the site with Yahoo and a few others. Yahoo was kind enough to give us the top link in one of their subcategory listings last week.
Second, please tell your friends about Educators' News. Write down the url for them, or print a tear-off page (52K PDF document) and leave it in the teachers' lounge. Unfortunately, we're still a year away from our own domain name (specifically for EdNews -- I already "own" the mathdittos2.com domain) and things like a chat room or message boards. The MATH DITTOS 2 server allocation lacks the space and the bandwidth on Syonic.com (our host) is variable at best. Debbie Wilhelmi and April Ryan of Knowledge Adventure sent along URLs for the JumpStart Languages and JumpStart Explorers described in yesterday's posting. Do be sure to check minimum system requirements on these two items. The August issue of Education Week is now available online. Education Week is on its summer publication schedule and will resume its weekly editions with the September 5 issue. I must have blinked and missed it, but Son of Weather Grok (Mac only) went to version 4.0.1 (1.2 MB) on Sunday...after I'd written the Monday posting about the version 4.0 update. StimpSoft's John Schilling writes, "Version 4.0.1 update fixes a potentially serious issue where deleting an item from the station list would cause a crash. Very, very sorry about the quick update, but that bug was a biggie." Wow! Isn't it something when a guy writes good software, gives it away for free, and then apologizes for a quick bug update! Thanks, John! In Because Teachers Don't Always Get What They Want (free registration required), Julie Flaherty tells of a web site where teachers can post their wish lists for potential donors to see. Created by history teacher Charles Best, Donors Choose allows New York City teachers to write proposals for prospective donors to browse. An Indianapolis Star column, Security steps mostly ineffective, study says, tells of the mixed results from new high-tech security systems installed in schools. A section that caught my eye in the column was:
It's a little hard to visualize my high school alma mater with security cameras. But then, the elementary school where I teach had security cameras installed last spring. A New York Times column, What the Founders Founded, put me onto the PBS four-part series, School: The History of American Public Education. Beginning September 3, the series "chronicles the great American experiment of universal education from its earliest roots to the present." The SchwabLearning.org this week considers testing in Assessment - An Overview and Assessment - Public or Private? School psychologist and trainer Diana Browning Wright helps parents and teachers analyze and shape student behavior in Changing Behavior. In The Expert Answers, Dr. Betty Osman writes about establishing and following rules.
Yahoo yesterday announced a new free service for higher ed, high school and middle school teachers called Yahoo! Education. The press release describes the new offering as "a free resource that enables educators at the college, high school and middle school levels to easily create a virtual classroom environment and communication center for their students." A tour of the features of the service is available. From the tour, this service looks like a good way for teachers who lack other web site access to post assignments and such. In case you were out of the galaxy yesterday and missed the news, Microsoft has appealed its antitrust convictions to the U.S. Supreme Court. Microsoft's appeal states that the United States Court of Appeals (D.C.) should have overturned the antitrust violations it upheld due to the out-of-court comments of trial judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. This is one of those stories everybody covers:
An update from ComputerWorld says the appeal has little chance of success, according the various legal experts. In another story from multiple sources, the State of Our Nation's Youth survey, given annually by the Horatio Alger Association, found "that high-school students see reducing the number of pupils in each class as the best path to better schools." Here's a link to the CNN Education version of the story. Two different sources report that a new virus has been discovered that can be embedded in programs attached to Adobe PDF (portable document format) files. CNET referred to the new virus by the name "Peachy." ComputerWorld quoted sources as referring to the virus as "Outlook.pdf." CNET reported that the worm only can do damage when opened in the full Adobe Acrobat program, rather than the more common Acrobat Reader. However, the ComputerWorld column made no such mention. As I looked around the web, there seem to be two
differing versions of the virus story somewhat rewritten on
various sites. What I didn't find was any information on the
new virus on Symantec,
McAfee,
or Adobe's
sites. As the MATH DITTOS 2 series is a collection of Adobe
PDF documents and I am an avid user of the full Acrobat
program, I'll be keeping an eye out for news on this new
virus.
Jeff Adkins Mac Lab Report for this week, Astronomy on the World Wide Web, has a great listing of educational astronomy sites on the web. Also on Low End Mac, Eric Schwarz's Back to School 'Books takes a look at used laptops for school use, considering the pros and cons of several models (all Mac, of course). School systems often bring in an inspirational speaker to address their staff before the first day of school. The St. Petersburg Times carries exerpts of such a speech from former teacher and superintendent, Raymond Golarz. It's a pleasant read in contract to all of the negative press education has been getting of late. Please excuse the short posting for today. My wife, Annie, got knocked off our dial-up connection last evening, and our ISP's server didn't log her out. Since we use a hometown ISP, there isn't 24/7 tech support, and we were without access until this morning. The good news in all of that is that when I called the ISP and left a message, I got a call back within minutes from a familiar voice and name saying she knew what had happened and had it fixed. While the experience is a bit frustrating, it's quite a contrast to contacting a national ISP and being on hold for hours.
It appears that the Code Red worm continues to cause damage across the internet. CNET reports that Microsoft, Federal Express, and Associated Press have all experienced serious problems due to the the virus. Wes George presented his interpretation of Apple's vision for K-12 education in a two part series for workingmac.com (1, 2). Wes mixes statements such as, "Children are our future and the quality of their education will determine how that future unfolds," and "In the near future, it will be inconceivable that anything less than a 1:1 ratio of student to computer is acceptable in K-12 education." The first statement warms the heart, while the second makes me wonder if Wes has been drinking too deeply, too long at Apple Ed's "PR Fountain." Diana Jean Schemo gives an update in today's New York Times of progress on the education reform bill in Congress May Ease Plans for School Accountability (free registration required). Schemo notes "Negotiators...are acknowledging that their original criteria for identifying failing schools are unrealistic, and they are moving away from the notion of penalizing schools based on a single year's test scores." Apparently, several different testing schemes are now being considered. Associated Press Writer Barnini Chakraborty discusses the national trend toward early school starts in Back to school: Early starts derail summer plans, upset parents and children. Leibniz, a graphical front end to Mathematica on Macintosh and Windows computers, has been updated to version 1.5.2. If you have some suggestions, news ideas, etc., please . |
The Sunday San Francisco Chronicle gets the very first Educators' News Gold Star (whatever that is) for excellent education coverage yesterday. I was thankful for their gaggle of excellent in-house and syndicated articles, as the Sunday New York Times web site was either offline or overwhelmed with hits most of the morning yesterday. The best of the bunch was a column by Chronicle Staff Writer Jonathan Curiel, 
That listing, along with continued support from a number of Mac-centric news sites, propelled site statistics last week from somewhere below embarrassing to almost credible:-).
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